Japan's trade ministry has reopened public comment on the funding roadmap that decides how a slice of state subsidy money gets spent decarbonizing steel mills and chemical plants. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Manufacturing Industries Bureau posted a draft revision of the R&D and Social Implementation Plan for the "Decarbonization of Thermal Processes in the Manufacturing Sector" project on July 9, opening a comment window that runs to 23:59 JST on August 7.
The plan governs part of the Green Innovation Fund, the pool of money the government parked at NEDO, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization, to back companies willing to treat decarbonization as a management priority. The mechanism promises up to ten years of continuous backing, from early research and demonstration work through full commercial rollout, rather than a one-off grant.
The target is deliberately narrow. Manufacturing accounts for roughly 30% of Japan's industrial CO2 emissions, and the draft plan singles out steel and chemicals as the sectors where that heat is hardest to strip of carbon: so-called hard-to-abate, energy-intensive industries where furnaces and kilns cannot simply be swapped for electric alternatives.
The revision was first vetted by the 38th meeting of the Industrial Structural Transformation Working Group, a subcommittee under the Industrial Structure Council's Green Innovation Project Panel, on July 8, a day before the comment period opened. METI has posted three linked documents alongside the notice: a comment procedure guide, a tracked-changes version of the revised plan, and a clean version incorporating those changes.
The filing makes clear this is a working draft, not a finalized rule. The solicitation is voluntary rather than grounded in a specific administrative procedure law provision, and the posted plan text still carries placeholder date markers instead of a finished issue date. METI says that once it has folded in public comments and the working group's feedback, its project office will finalize the plan and then "sequentially begin solicitations," the funding calls that let steel and chemical producers actually apply for money under the revised targets. No award amounts, application deadlines or eligibility criteria for that next round have been published yet.